#323 Annie Jacobsen - Is America Ready for Biological War?

I mean, in the old days, you have to go on like a news program and talk for four minutes in between a commercial break.

“They gave you four minutes. Right. That's generous. Yeah. Yeah.”

Podcasts have reached. Okay. Good story. Sean Ryan's story. I'm in about podcast having reached. I'm in. I'm an avid skier. I'm in the Italian Alps in February. Oh, I guess. Okay. Skin. A little hot like a like a hotel that you skins get out couldn't be in more in the middle of nowhere in the dual might mountains. There with the whole family go to settle the bill with the night manager at the end of the thing and he says to me, I have to say I really enjoyed seeing you on the Sean Ryan show podcast in the Italian Alps.

Because God is my witness and my husband who is standing there, right? And I said, you're kidding. And he said, no. And he said, I'm a fan of the show and now I read your books. That's awesome. That's awesome. In the middle of the Italian dolomite mountains. I'll but it's beautiful up there.

Yeah. It's gorgeous. But that's reach for you. And it's incredible to think about how much we are alike.

I mean, what really would you think the night manager at a small hotel in the mountains in Italy would necessarily have in common with you or I and then you have that. That is cool. Desire to communicate desire for information, you know, listening to a good podcast. So congratulations to you. I appreciate that. Well, it's good to have you back, Annie. Thank you. It's great to be here.

Awesome to have you back. I love talking to you.

Oh, I love talking to you. So let me give you an introduction here for anybody that missed the first episode.

Annie Jacobson your Pulitzer Prize finalist investigative journalist in New York Times best selling author who spent your career uncovering some of the most secretive aspects of the US government. You've written best selling books, including Area 51, Operation Paperclip, The Pentagon's Brain, Surprise Kill, Vanish, Nuclear War, a scenario in your newest release, Biological Warfare, a scenario. Everyone loved your last appearance on the show. So we loved to have you back.

“And I gotta say, Annie, I think your timelines are a little reversed here with the previous book, Nuclear War and the new one.”

I want you to work warfare. But what do you think about all this stuff going on? I mean, in Iran, the nuclear, I mean, I don't think anything's going to happen. You mean, is the war in Iran ratcheting up the threat of nuclear war per se? I mean, you know, it's such a rabbit hole of a topic that war.

I don't because Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapon, and because the alleged premise of that war is to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon. It exists in a little bit of a different lane that then I am really interested in reporting on, which is what if a nuclear war happens? Yeah, because Iran has almost had a bomb for a very long time. So it does seem to me like an easy. I don't want to use the word excuse, but I'm going to use the word excuse. You know?

Yeah.

“Well, I think, you know, there is something that I wanted to relate to here.”

I mean, are you, you wear the tick thing? Which tick thing? I mean, we've got people trying to force us to eat, fake meat, artificial meat, buying up all our farmland, then genetically altering insects, ticks. Now, we have this alpha gall disaster going on right now. I don't know how many people have it, but what do you think of that?

I think that anything talking about bio is like circling around what could eventually be the drain, unless something isn't done. So in a bizarre way, bringing from where I sit, who just loves information, loves sharing information, loves having conversations about not right, not wrong, uncertainty being a huge principle. I think whether it's the Legionnaires disease that just broke out in New York City right now, or the ticks you're talking about. What is that? What?

I don't even heard of that.

You know, these are all pathogens that suddenly make their way into a small population that is called an outbreak.

“And then the real question is, is it going to become an epidemic, local, and then the real question is going to become a pandemic?”

So I think that any of the subjects that bring it to people's attention, there's an Ebola epidemic going on right now in Africa. There was a Honda virus scare on that cruise ship in May. These things surface people talk about them, they learn a little bit. To my eye, it's just so much more helpful to kind of learn basics about bio and what a bio, a genetically modified pathogen is. Then kind of either be terrified by it or politicize it, because everybody is going to lose if there's a biological incident.

And interestingly, because, of course, I write about word weapons, you know, biological war is one of the only threats in the defense department world of sort of nomenclature and monographs and protocols. That doesn't have to be an attack, it can also be an incident. So, a lab leak. It sounds familiar.

A very, very high threat level situation for everybody.

So again, it's like information, not panic, pressure, pressure to learn more.

“I mean, they just, what would you rather go through, a nuclear war scenario or a biological pathogen that?”

Okay, first of all. Is that could be, that could be a long, slow, painful death. I mean, so I guess, so could nuclear war, if you weren't in the blast zone, but. I mean, one of the biggest takeaways that readers came back at me with after reading nuclear war as an area was, I just want to die in the immediate blast.

Because, you know, it's like that Nakeda cruise ship quote, the survivors would end the dead. In many ways, bio has that same component, probably because of what you said that you just think of having this like long, slow, painful death. But the reality I learned when researching and reporting this book is actually a little bit more frightening, which is that, so in nuclear war, I take readers from nuclear launch to nuclear winter in 72 minutes. Not days, minutes.

“That's how fast it could happen according to Strathcom.”

In biological war, I take the readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Because anarchy in insurrection is the real threat. And that was shocking to learn again from the defense department. And you're talking about in the homeland. Anarchy in insurrection, a common phrase I came across when looking at declassified documents was,

fear of infection will send America spiraling into anarchy in insurrection, fear of infection. There's just something so visceral about this idea of being infected. And you prepare for this kind of stuff. What is your house look like? What did you get a bunker?

No, I just have a house. But I just really think man-made problems, man-made solution. And that's the optimist in me. But it is really helpful to know what you're up against. It's very helpful to know.

I mean, why am I going to give you like the three basic ideas of bio to understand? Because sometimes I write for everybody. Just give it to me so I can understand it. That's the questions I ask, the smartest people in the room, and it's what I try to convey. Because if you're too knowledgeable on a subject, sometimes you lose your audience.

So, and we all live through the COVID pandemic. So, whenever you're talking about a biological incident, three things, how might I get it? That's transmissibility. How might I get it?

How deadly is it? Okay, COVID? 1% death rate. 1 out of 100 people died. Flu?

0.1%. Okay.

Third thing is, is there something I can take that will heal me?

Three basic components.

And so, through all of modern history and defense department planning against biological war,

has been like looking at those three and creating lists of fears around them. And so, when people don't know any of that, the fear, like for example, your tick situation, a tick is called a vector born disease, so it has to bite you for you to be infected. Okay.

“The most deadly threat is an airborne pathogen, and that's what COVID was.”

So, something that can be breathed in something that can linger in the room. That's a real problem, and that's the scenario I take readers through, an airborne pathogen, because that is what all of government fears. It's unstoppable. The weapon essentially becomes the human law.

The weapons delivery system becomes the human lungs. And another really interesting thing to me learning about all this was that the uncertainty idea is so huge in public health. Remember when COVID happened, or maybe people don't remember this, because it's kind of like easier to forget.

But the first three months, the CDC who is in charge, and the WHO who's kind of in charge internationally,

were sending out tweets that said COVID not airborne. N-O-T in big letters. I reprint one of their tweets in the book. Rise. COVID not airborne.

It was airborne. It was airborne. And instead of admitting they were wrong or even out of the gates saying, "Look, we don't know," because they didn't know. To insist that, then creates this kind of spiraling mistrust, hence you're opening question about trust, you know. He's gone through, you know, the outline and said, "Broad a lot of stuff to mind."

I mean, we'll get into the book here just a second.

If you looked at ancestry.com or like any of these, you know, my mind's gone black or biometrics, you know, companies. I mean, in who owns them, and I mean, they could take your DNA that you paid to have tested and create a bio weapon specifically designed to assess and aid you. Absolutely. I mean, individual targets are a whole other dirty game. And historically, that has been going on for a very long time.

The Soviets had huge assassination programs specifically, you know, creating, like, like, biopoysants. Poisoning is like one of the oldest assassination ruses in the world. I mean, you can think of like, a poison arrow. Like somebody, there was, there was an al-Qaeda guy that got assassinated.

“I want to say one of the, like, before the war on terror, he was, um, in Kosovo, I believe.”

And he, Katob was his last name. And he, like, opened up a letter or, and, and somehow licked it or just closed the letter. And that there was poison on it and he died. So there are these very specific assassinations that way. But what I think is the really big threat is this, what, what the defense department calls,

what FEMA calls, what HHS, our health and human services call. Because bio is a multi-agency event, which is even more complex and threatening. Because now you're talking about multiple agencies and stove piping. But you have, um, you know, you have airborne pathogens that can be, or rather, you have pathogens that can be genetically modified to your point. To become airborne, right?

So, um, genetic modification of path, let's start, let me, let me, let me say one thing.

“The pathogen thing can kind of be like, what the hell is that?”

Viruses and bacteria are both pathogens, germs are everywhere. We have germs in our stomachs, germs are not necessarily bad. When you call it a pathogen, that means it can be deadly. Virus and bacteria, COVID was a virus, plague, which I use as the pathogen in my book. That scenario, plague, is a bacteria.

So, anti-biotics, kill of a plague.

“Now with genetic modification, you can tweak the plague pathogen, which is called your senior pestis,”

so that it is immune to the antibiotics. That's where we're into some very sinister genetic modifications. The most people don't know about, don't want to know about, but probably should know a little bit about, because it helps you know what you're up against. Most gear looks good until you actually start using it.

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It's a lot, a lot cheaper to produce a bio weapon, a lot easier to sneak it in the country. A lot easier to get it released. I don't, I'm not a scientist or they would do, you know, you see, you know, all the things that are being created right now. The dire wolf, the wolfly mammoth supposedly is coming back.

We had Charles Hoskins and on who's one of the scientists. They'd be heard about the plants that they're developing. They're making biolumines and plants that can glow.

Whatever color they want, which is amazing.

You know, some of the use, I mean, he was saying, you know, you could put these things around, put these plants around a nuclear power plan or whatever. And if there's any radiation leaking, then the plants will glow red. And he showed me pictures of what these things look like. We couldn't put it on the episode because it was so early on.

But, I mean, it's, it, it's like something you would see in that movie, the avatar. It's like science fiction, except for its science facts. It's, yes, real. And this is, you know, when you're talking about these kind of modifications to mother nature,

“it brings up this idea, which I think is super important and it's kind of at the heart of all of this debate,”

discussion, science moving forward, which is dual use. So yes, if you're able to create plants that can detect radiation leakage, that's another form of an intelligence vehicle, like what's called "masent". You know, like we have sniffer technology. We have, you know, we can test sewer water. We can, same as we can see, you know, explosions from space.

That's a signals intelligence. So, measurement and signature intelligence, called "masent" would be the plants. And that would be terrific for us, because it's a way of, you know, understanding what an adversary is up to. In the biomedical world, the reason you have genetic modification, the reason this all began, and by the way, it was kind of discovered, invented in 1971, in a live in California.

It's Stanford, genetic modification. So, the idea of those scientists, they certainly weren't weapons engineers.

They were like, "We're going to be able to create incredible medical countermeasures."

You know, so many soldiers died in World War II, because of wound infection.

Penicillin comes along, fantastic.

“You've taken, you've knocked out all of so many bacteria deaths.”

So, that's the idea if you're, you know, a doctor, if you're trying to do good in the world, or trying to kind of keep the world in balance. But the other side of dual use is weaponizing something. And one of the original sort of components I saw after I wrote nuclear war, and I was like, "Am I really going to touch bio?"

And I had had many sources saying to me, "Annie, you've got to write about it." Because it's more threatening. There's a threat spectrum diagram that I found an unclassified version of it in looking through the defense department documents. And it shows all the weapons of mass destruction on a scale.

And of course, nuclear weapons are at the worst end because they are the most destructive.

But bio weapons are considered by the defense department the greatest overall threat.

Really? Greatest overall threat. That is shocking. That needs to be discussed. Yeah.

And it's because the bar for entry is so low. You know, think about what? Think about we've had nuclear technology for 80 years now. Weapons technology. There's an incredibly low bar for, I mean, high bar for entry. You can't just make a nuclear bomb in your basement.

Bio weapons? People will now tell you that like a high school student with limited biology can essentially do some genetic tweaks to create this kind of thing. Absolutely. Absolutely.

That sounds alarmist. That is like worthy of a discussion in an of itself.

That's basically everybody.

Everybody. Yeah. High school students compete in sort of science courses doing genetic tweaks. I had no idea. High school's come along.

What are you saying? I was dissected fraud. Same thing. We're not doing genetic modifications. Wow.

Wow. So where do we start today? Where do you want to start? Where do you want to start? What was your inspiration?

Oh, God. What a funny word, right? I mean inspiration for writing a book about the end of the world. You know, the fact that biological war is considered a near extinct potentially. A near extinction level event.

That's the nomenclature. A near ELE.

“But I think, you know, inspiration, I am a storyteller.”

I am really interested in telling and dramatic narrative. I want people to read what I write. And it's not necessarily meant to terrify them. But maybe to put pressure on, you know, government, people. But the most shocking part about it for me was that there are plans in place like nuclear war.

There are plans in place for this kind of a near extinction level event, which I, you know, spoiler alert on the end of this book, where I take the readers through, you know, outbreak to anarchy in six days. What happens after anarchy is an actual government plan called devolution. Devolution pronounced two different ways, depending on using.

Evolution with the D in front of it. It's exactly like you would think. Wait, what evolution moving forward? Devolution is going back. So it's a government plan.

The name devolution is unclassified. The program is classified. I had the man who signed off on the last version of it. Take me right up Obama's FEMA Director, Craig Fugate, take me. You readers right up to the edge of what can legally be known.

That this program exists. So that after anarchy in insurrection happens, which will, we can get into why.

“A essentially secret government disappears.”

Often to a bunch of bunkers called hot sites, warm sites, and cold sites. To hunker down so that they can rebuild the government once everybody dies. Real, real program. I saw that. So who, a lot of questions.

It is a pre chosen pre-designated list of people.

Now that list is classified. Who is on that list is classified. How that list is determined is classified. But I'm glad we're talking about this because let's speculate. Because that's all we can do here.

I would guess it certainly changes by administration. Right? In other words, the current president is not going to have a bunch of former president. Biden's designates go off and run the government. So then you really think about it like, wow, imagine being in that room.

Um, deciding, okay, who are, essentially there's kind of like a mirror image person of every high ranking official. Because you have to assume, okay,

Podis could get the airborne bacteria and his lungs and die.

So who's going to be the devolution? Podis, the national security advisor, the sect staff. Right? So all of these individuals. And by the way, it's not just defense department. It's health officials.

It's, you know, Supreme Court justices. It's the government has to run. So then, I mean, you have the eyebrow raising side that I had, which is, Wow, that's a lot of plant. If there's that much planning that goes into catastrophe.

“Why don't we have more public awareness about how to not have this happen?”

We, we'll get into that discussion. It's called D, D of illusion. Devolution. Devolution. And we don't know how often, I mean,

Is there, there's a lot of conspiracies on who really runs the government and running wild right now. They ran wild in the last administration as well. I mean, I'm probably every administration that comes. Uh, they'll be this question. You think there's a possibility that

Maybe, uh, they don't get picked. Maybe they're the ones that are running everything. You mean that actual devolution is already at effect and taking care of things? That I don't know. It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, you know.

Um, I mean, I also think conspiracy theory is such a bad term.

“I think it should be changed to speculative narrative.”

I love that. Because I mean, for example, when COVID happened on top of the WHO and the CDC saying COVID not airborne when it was airborne.

So they got the most basic, most important, most critical fact wrong.

And by the way, they've never admitted it. They've just, they just quietly changed the idea that COVID was airborne about a year later. Uh-huh. So, and there's that. And then there was the lab leak component of things,

which separate from what you think about that. Um, is a real possibility, okay? And yet when that was first reported, it was actually called a conspiracy theory by major news outlets. And we know it wasn't a conspiracy theory. So why not change that verbage to speculative narrative?

It just takes everybody way down off the ledge. You can even say, you know, if you're talking about, you can say it's a wildly speculative narrative. But to call something a conspiracy theory, I think is such self-righteous indignation and so potentially dangerous. Because once you say that, you have a really tough time walking it back and admitting your wrong.

“And that's why I created that term, correct?”

Conspiracy theory? Didn't I? I don't know that. I have heard many different things. I think I would-- Or is that a speculative narrative? Good. Look at that. It changed the change the thinking and the way people talk right here and now on the Sean Ryan Show podcast.

But do you know what I mean? It gives room for being wrong. There's something really, really character building about being able to keep yourself open to. I might be wrong about this. And I don't know why it has disappeared from the government. I just really don't know.

I mean, there's a famous JFK quote after the Bay of Pigs, which is a failure. Okay? And JFK said something like, you know, in paraphrasing like success has a thousand fathers. Failure is an orphan. And he was admitting his mistake in the Bay of Pigs. The CIA paramilitary attempt at invading Cuba that failed, you know, drastically.

And I think that's profoundly important.

It's part of all of our personal lives, certainly minds, I mean, right? You've got to be able to with your kids. I do it all the time publicly. I've got to do it two or three times this year, unfortunately.

“But, you know, I think you think, you know, that's why we're in the big distrust era of the government and all of our institutions and pretty much everything right now.”

Nobody has been able to invent wrong and, you know, the funny thing is is, you know, it, it, it instantaneously re-establishes your credibility and even lifts it more because people realize all this person actually has a moral compass. This person actually lives by a set of values. Yes.

And it can't say for anybody in government because they never do their, their, their two proud, there's too much pride.

Pride goes before the fall. I mean, I just think about pride as ego, which, or the unhealthy part of ego, maybe the healthy part of ego is uncertainty, you know, being able to say like, you know, I don't know, but I think it's this. I still cannot, I could not get a straight, I'm, I'm always trying to get a straight answer from government officials on these certain questions like that, like asking the CDC, why have you never admitted you a wrong about, you know, COVID not airborne and they won't, they won't go there.

So people mistrust. You've asked them. I always ask. What do they say today?

I mean, usually you get a sword on those questions, right? They, I mean, it's why I spend so much of my time interviewing former, you know, former,

Stratcom commander, former FEMA chief.

“Because once they are out of government, they're really out of the cat emergency, which is kind of fair that when you are in a government position, you have to tow the party line.”

Really answer a straight question without going to 10 press officers and finding out what you're supposed to say. And maybe that, you know, is understandable on some component, but it also should change because people, I think, are advancing way beyond that in their own personal life. You know, just the ability to get information on your fingertips is just so much faster now than it ever was that the government needs to adapt to that. You know, we'll get back to you and answer on that. And then six weeks later, they're giving you the answer and the question has already changed.

What about, what else about this devolution? I mean, it was, was that a surprise to you?

“Yeah, yeah, I mean, I've heard that term referenced, but it's always, it's, it's referenced without any information attached to it because it's the only thing.”

It's the only thing that's declassified. I was really kind of stunned that Craig Fugate was able to really share with me what he did because he signed off on the 2016 version of it, the last day of the Obama administration. And that is the set of protocols from which all updates are made. So the system hasn't changed. The names on the list might. But, you know, there are other really, really interesting details I learned, like, okay, again, spoiler alert, right? The president gets moved in the event of a major biological catastrophe, where people are, there is a pathogen that has a case fatality rate of 100%.

I told you COVID had 1%, plague, not bubonic plague, but pneumonic plague, which is pneumonic pneumonia, so in the lungs. When plague goes into the lungs, not bubonic plague, if you get bitten by a tick, you get bubonic plague. Your lymph node swell up, and, you know, it sort of takes over parts of the body, your lymph system. pneumonic plague in the lungs, 100% case fatality rate. 100%, 100%.

You get it, you die, unless you take antibiotics. You have to take antibiotics within 24 hours, within 24 hours. By the way, I have one of my major sources on the book, is one of the world's experts on bubonic plague, pneumonic plague. Dr. Henry Hine, he was at use Sam Reg, which is at Fort Detrick, studying this for a very long time, until he left now he works privately.

Big fear of defense department, CDC, HHS, all of these organizations would be involved in a bio event.

Something a pathogen is released, either a lab leak or an attack, it's airborne, and it has a case fatality rate of 100%. Then I said the medical countermeasures, how are we going to stop it? Well, what if it has been genetically modified to defeat antibiotics? Again, sounds like Annie's talking science fiction. There are plans in place because this is what is feared. I'm sure there are. In this event, the president, I learned. This is like, you know, sometimes you get information and then you go, I got a reverse engineer in my book from that, because this is just too dramatic.

The president does not get moved to a big bunker like Ravenrock or Mount weather.

Any of these command centers we can talk about if you want more details. He gets moved to like what's called a cold site, like really far away by himself. It's such a crazy visual to think about the president of the United States with a gas mask by himself in a room. It's military aid with the nuclear football outside the door and a couple secret service agents watching the building for how long. I mean, that to me sounds like science fiction to realize it's science fact is like, I got to know about this.

“And that's how I work as a reporter. Like, okay, so how does that happen?”

You know, that's the end of the conversation.

Yeah, I'd like to go back a little bit and talk about maybe the biological arms race before we get to this, but we don't rise. But who do they think they're going to even govern? You know, I mean, the trillionaires that are building the billionaires and trillionaires that are building bunkers and Hawaii. What are they going to do? Come out and talk or do what? What are you going to govern Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? I don't think so. They're not being governed right now.

“And you got to think of the skills you have to have to survive in that kind of a world. Okay, so biological arms race. Here's an interesting fact.”

Biological war is illegal. Biological weapons are illegal. Nuclear weapons are not illegal. Crazy thought. Okay. Okay. There's only a certain amount of countries that have them and they're making sure no one else gets them hence Iran. But nuclear weapons are not illegal to those who hold them. Biological weapons all biological weapons are illegal. They were made illegal by a treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention. The BWC is the treaty in 1972. Before that, the United States had a massive arsenal of biological weapons, which is just crazy to think about.

That's Cold War paranoia for you. We had them rush ahead.

“The United States had them. China was building them, North Korea. So they became illegal. President Nixon decided they're repugnant to the conscience of mankind. That's what he said.”

Okay. And makes them illegal. Everyone saw, we destroyed our biological weapons. It took two hundred and nineteen weeks to destroy them by the way. Everybody says we're going to destroy our weapons. Biological weapons. Everybody signs the treaty, not for another twenty years. Would the United States learn from Soviet defector scientists that the Russians went like this. Oh, yeah. Here we sign that treaty. And then they began to build a colossal biological weapons program. They called it their Manhattan Project.

And the idea, which is so spooky, is that they wanted to kill all the people in America and the West and leave the infrastructure intact. Those were their words. Interesting, smart and interesting and evil. I mean, you know, we were talking about ancestry dot com 23 and me. Yeah. Who knows what else is out there. The people are using, but I mean, when you say an arsenal of biological. How many, how many different types of biological weapons do you need? Did, did, did, can they, I mean, I'm sure they can. I mean, can they can they engage, you know, but by sucking that DNA out or lab court, you know, the biggest blood diagnostics company in the world.

Allegedly, but is it possible to create a biological weapon that would only target American DNA, Canadian DNA, North American DNA, Latino DNA, black DNA, yeah.

“Any race? There is. And that, by the way, this is not something I get into in the book. It was a little too speculative narrative for me to really go down. Okay, but let me tell you who to that was confirmed.”

I asked that exact question to Admiral Brett Joar. And he was the assistant secretary of health and human services at the White House during COVID.

Okay, he's also a medical doctor. He ran DARPA's bioscience office. He's an incredible human being. He's like a, he's a character in the book for sure.

I mean, he's really a remarkable person, you know, grew up in a small town in Texas, first guy in his town to go to Harvard, you know, fully dedicated to services whole life. I asked him that question and he said to me after a bit of a pause. Yes. And there are suspicions that China is doing that. So the suspicions part of it is where I make a distinction for Annie as a journalist. I'm going to work my scenario from what is known, what is on the record and what has been confirmed by people on the other side.

Then I can never be accused of like fear among, like if I were to go down that lane, perhaps people would say, well, you're fear mongering because it's speculative because you don't know for sure, right? Now, when you have someone like Admiral Joar saying it's speculative, the subtext in that, you and I can infer what that means.

“I think someone like that is going to say something like that to me off the cuff without a little more fear shall we say then speculation.”

So there's speculative rumors that China is creating this or has, yes, and there is also. So happy to have Asian blood. Yes. How is that? You got to tell me that. How is that? Because I'm hard Japanese. Wow. I'm good.

I never knew that. Mom or dad? Dad. Dad. Interesting. Okay, so you got the DNA immunity perhaps. If that's the case, there's a very interesting paper for anyone who's interested in reading on this.

So Dr. Robert Cadlich, source in the book, he was, he is now the current administration essentially the bio defense chief. He was dedicated to bio defense starting in the Bush administration has had huge powerful jobs across every administration. He actually ran operation warp speed during COVID, which was the vaccine program. He's an Air Force Colonel and a medical doctor and he's now the current president's bio defense chief. So he, you know, we had conversation before and then when you go back into the administration, you can't really talk to a journalist like me.

But right before going back into the administration, he wrote a paper on Chinese on China's biological program. So the State Department speculates China has a bio weapons program.

“The State Department confirms that Russia has a bio weapons program, North Korea has a bio weapons program, according to the U.S. State Department. China may be Iran may be. That's what they say.”

Maybe they say maybe. I'm sorry. What was the Wuhan lab? So here's maybe. And again, we're talking about language. What about Ukraine? We're talking about language. Those are our bio labs. Those were some of ours. So the position of the State Department is that the Russian biological program I told you about that, the very evil program in the 70s and 80s was absorbed not dismantled. And so that is why they take the position Russia still has a program. And China, so let me, this, this is how a diplomat would clarify maybe.

That couldn't, the treaty I told you about the B.W.C., which everybody is supposed to adhere to all the signatories and not have bio weapons.

And so that's where you get the Wuhan excuse, which is that we were modifying the coronavirus so that we would know how to defend against it.

“You see, so that's the kind of catch 22 in plain language I call it a hooky do, which allows these BSL four labs bio safety level four.”

That's the highest level, guys and spacesuits to manipulate viruses and pathogens in really dangerous ways. So that in case somebody else uses it, we know how to defend against it. And that has its own longer conversation and it's extremely dangerous.

It's called gain of function. It's just like it sounds. You are trying to make a pathogen gain new function mentioned before, virulence, transmissibility.

How do we catch it? Virulence, is it going to kill me and how fast? And is there a medical counter measure? Those three components gain a function tweaks those. Okay, so let's make it more airborne.

“Let's make it from droplet transmission, which would be me coughing at you. Sorry for my spit hitting you. That's droplet transmission versus us talking airborne lingering in the air.”

Somebody else could walk in here after we leave airborne. It's still here. That's the number one threat. You can with gain of function genetic engineering. You can make a pathogen airborne. What are the different kinds? Do you know of pathogens? Of bio weapons. Well, the gem's bio weapons. Yeah, I mean, great question. And again, stuff we should know about, right? Because then we can read we the public can react appropriately. As opposed to start creating speculative narratives about what could happen. Ebola, for example, you know, the haunt of virus, right? So the CDC keeps a list of what are called tier one.

Carmen, germ, select agents. Those are the pathogens that their most afraid will be weaponized. Subtext have been weaponized in the past. They probably have speculative intelligence or being weaponized. Play is one of them. Why 100% death rate if you don't have antibiotics? Anthrax is another Ebola is another because it's got fear factor. Ebola is not airborne. But what if you could tweak a bullet to be airborne? What is a bullet to do? Ebola is called a hemorrhagic fever virus, right? So think of what hemorrhaging is.

Okay, Ebola causes the body, the entire body to hemorrhage. You're bleeding out your eyes, your ears, your nose. I mean, it is a horrific terrifying disease. It's also not airborne.

“It's, you get Ebola from close contract. If there's somebody over there in that corner bleeding out, you know, if you're a first responder, you may go help them. That's why doctors first responders.”

If you're the patient's mother, that's why the loved ones die from Ebola. But the guy walking down the street is not going to get Ebola because he's going to keep his distance. So that's again, takes us back to transmissibility. It takes us to virulence. Ebola is 85-90% rate killer.

So it's super deadly. Is there a medical counter measure against it? Third question to ask.

Well, after the 2014 Ebola epidemic, doctors got at it. The same kind of doctors that Dr. Cadillac worked with with warp speed. Doctors got at it. They created in San Diego a medical counter measure called Z-map. So when one Ebola patient arrived in Texas in 2014 and gave his two nurses Ebola, he died because he was further along. Those two nurses in this heroics that is completely unknown, but involves Dr. Admiral Gerard, which is why I know the story. He knew about the Z-map medical counter measure being developed in San Diego.

The CDC in Texas wouldn't help him. It hadn't been authorized. He got a friend who was a pilot and had a plane to fly to San Diego. Get the Z-map, brought it back, gave it to the nurses they lived.

Will doctors will scientists be able to create a medical counter measure fast enough before that epidemic that is going on in Africa become grows and becomes bigger. Who knows? Will that epidemic be able to be contained and put out?

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“When you're writing and doing this research, have been to you, do you?”

If you thought about, if you were to create a bio weapon, what it would look like? Me? I mean... Well, I do. I've been thinking about it the entire conversation already. I would do now. Tell me. Tell me. Have you thought about it? Well, I think about that. It's a fascinating question. I think about that from the dramatic narrative point of view, working from what is scientifically possible.

So that's why I chose pneumonic plague.

And even more so, the reason why I chose pneumonic plague is for very specific reason that when the Soviet defectors came finally revealed to the West,

what the Russians had been doing. And mind you, this is 30, 40 years ago when genetic engineering was not possible. They had created a super plague weapon, airborne, to with plans to be genetically modified. This is early genetic engineering, like almost like imagine using scissors to cut film and taping it back together, as opposed to digital editing today. That would be the analogy of where things were. They, the Russian, the Soviet scientists, by their own admittance, created a plague weapon that they had built in it genetically modified it to defeat antibiotics.

And even worse, to actually trigger a new disease in cephalitis in the brain. Once you take the antibiotic, and by the Russian scientist's own admittance, the reason they did that was because they hated America so much in the Cold War. Not only did they want to kill all the people and take the infrastructure, march in and just take everything. The buildings would be there unlike in nuclear, but they wanted people to die with the last thought in their brain that the government had failed them because the antibiotics that the American medical establishment and the government told Americans to take to defeat the plague weapon

would kill them in even more horrific way. This was their plan. This is on the book, this is documented. So to answer your question, I couldn't come up with anything more sinister than that myself. And I wanted to stick to science fact, and so that's the very specific pathogen that gets unleashed in biological wars scenario, my book. And by the way, it's not a nefarious act, it's a lab leak. Wow.

I don't, you know.

“I think what I would do is, I would have stages.”

Maybe you do something that is an attention-grapper, like COVID, maybe you make a pathogen that targets the reproductive system, and then you get the new cycle going, and it's all we can't, you know what I mean?

And what you have the antidote, you let the headlines circulate.

This is why you're not reproducing because I've created this. And if you want the antidote, then your government is going to do XY and Z. Maybe it's something even quicker, you know, maybe it maybe it is something like COVID.

“If you want to get better, this is what you're going to do.”

If you try to docus, you won't get the antidote. So this is what's going to happen. If you don't listen, then we're going to go to the next step, and we're going to prove to you that it's real. And this is what's going to happen to your body. Then that happens.

Then everybody's, they know, you know, and then it just keeps escalating. If you want to save human life.

Or give them the option to save themselves.

That's how I would do it. And that's a very sort of red-teaming mind scenario, which is what war games at the Pentagon from my understanding are entirely based on, like getting people to think through those incredibly sinister ideas to try and have a plan in place to prevent that from happening. And so in my experience and learning about of all this,

what's interesting about this is that is all very valuable.

“And that sort of historical red-teaming and war gaming.”

But what has been left out of the discussion are two major components, which is one how fast science and technology are moving. So you can't possibly keep up with it. Although yours did the three-stage thing is really sinister and, you know, very scientific. Well, it also gives them the option to save themselves.

Explain to me that a little bit more on the third part of it.

On my plan? Yeah, yeah. My plan is you get the attention. Okay. Everybody knows something's up.

Then you take credit for what's happening. Okay, just the bad guy. Yeah, it is the bad guy. Or the good guy. Okay.

I mean, maybe there is genocide going on somewhere in the world. Okay. Like we see all over right now, right? And then the country that's committing genocide gets a pathogen. It makes their people sick.

They're not dying. Maybe some die. You know what I mean? But it gives you grabs that nation's headlines. And then you make the statement.

If you don't want this to continue, you stop the genocide right now. If the genocide continues, then we'll move to stage two. Stage two is you bleed out of every orifice in your body. Would you like that to happen? Yes or no.

You have two hours. And this is two hours goes by. They don't do it. The next pathogen is released. It's already staged.

It stops. They get the antidote. That gets released. And these are some of the hallmarks of early biological warfare thinking. With another component mixed in, which is that you would need to inoculate, give a vaccine essentially to your own people that would be anywhere near that area to make sure they didn't.

Well, that's dependent if you, you know, if you target a certain race of people that all share a common strand of DNA. Yes. And this is exactly what that cold war mentality was, by the way. It was really, it's almost like mental, you know, hostage taking essentially on a grand scale. And then the conclusion by pretty much everyone involved was the blowback idea was that you couldn't, you couldn't contain it.

Because the pathogen would have to be contagious to be, you know, really effective. And then you, you would have these co-centric circles of people getting sick. So that's where it kind of biological warfare became obsolete in terms of thinking. And that's why they made it illegal. But people still think about that.

And now with scientific advancements with genetic engineering, being able to target individual people is becoming much more realy.

“And by the way, that's what I meant to say, in Dr. Cadlick's paper, he's the current bio defense chief.”

There's a public paper you can read that he wrote on China's, what he believes is China's, or rather, what's on the record about China's biological program. And the Chinese officials in the defense department have essentially said they are not against.

I mean, it's that just, it's been, this is what God did to the Egyptians and the Old Testament, correct?

It is a narrative that is, that is existed. And it's like, you know, where does it go, the, the argument not to have that is, it's too evil. And it's, it has the consequences are too great. Hence the idea that is, you know, odious to the nature of mankind.

“So the bigger idea that I think we're getting to is like, so what is the solution?”

If all of this is possible, what is the solution? And right now we're kind of, I think, stuck in this idea of like, well,

the debate is really only on the gain of function, right?

The debate is like, we need, the bad guys are making those kind of weapons, maybe even targeting a certain genetic population. And so we have to create medical countermeasures because of it. And if that can, you know, if you think that's utopian or dystopian, that's a worthy debate, I think, because I've heard arguments on both sides of the aisle.

Like, you cannot prevent the bad guys, the adversary, whoever they may be, terrorist organizations. Some crazy college kid or high school student in his basement. You can't prevent them. You can't prevent all evil. The thresholds too low. So the biotechnology industry must prevail. Must be allowed to work on these medical countermeasures that involve tweaking the virulence,

the transmissibility, and the medical countermeasures of different pathogens.

“Either way, I think it's very important that people know about this.”

So that in the God forsaken event something does happen, there's not an immediate wildly speculative narrative, right? So does the government have any countermeasures for the citizens of this country or is it just for themselves? Well, the countermeasure question, the reason why I use that Soviet sort of evil concept. It's called a Kymera weapon, bioweapon. The Kymera is this ancient Greek monster.

You've seen images of it, like think of the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent with a goat coming out of it. A Kymera just means like a multi-specied monster. And that is essentially what genetic engineering is. You're taking the DNA of one viral species and you're mixing it with another. And so the Kymera weapon, the original Kymera weapon, was this plague super weapon that would you take the antidote and it turns into a booby trap and it kills you. So that idea becomes what the defense department calls a wicked problem.

Because there is no solution to it. Because how do you know whether or not the antibiotic is going to kill you unless you have evidence? And that's where the devolution plan happens pretty much really fast because the chances can't be taken because the threat is so high. And so on the public health side of things, you have a lot of people instead of saying, well, this is, you can't just go down the evil rabbit hole of the military, you know, industrial complex.

“You have to have public health awareness.”

And that's why there are a lot of people I interviewed in the book, we're like, it's all about diagnostics, diagnostics, fancy word for testing. I mean, remember in COVID by the end of COVID year two, whatever it was, I live in Los Angeles, you could buy a COVID test at the 711. Remember, did you have that access kind of your, you could literally? We may have, I don't know, the tested and work.

I got, I never wanted to get tested anyways, because you know there was the, there was the speculative narratives that they were calling you after you got tested to make sure.

But you know, whatever. And, um, but my wife was pregnant at the time, nobody really knew what the hell was going on. And, um, and so I did, I did get tested. And I took two tests and one was positive and one was negative. And the speculative narratives were correct.

I did get calls. And it was just a met like a urgent care. Yeah, it took it at an urgent care. Yeah.

And that was before that.

So yeah, I guess that was, if I could have done something undocumented, then I would have done something undocumented. Yeah. Because I don't, I don't want my information in the government's hands, but, um, not that it isn't already. But, so now we didn't, we didn't have the over-the-counter tests with that particular point in time. Which would have been over on 2021.

So in big cities, they were, you could suddenly literally buy a dip, they were called dipstick test. And you could sit in your car and test yourself.

And then you were supposed to, because there were asymptomatic people in COVID.

Meaning people who carried COVID, the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It's called officially. And didn't have any symptoms like my son. So then you were supposed to work on the honor system of like not being around anybody, because you were a carrier. It's called a silent carrier.

You could get everybody else sick, but you weren't sick.

“But I think your point about not wanting the government to know is so incredibly important that the government has to learn from these errors.”

You have to work with the public. People do not want the sense that the government is lurking over them and looming over them, particularly with their health. It's the bio, it's like the biotechnology surveillance military industrial complex. And it's very real. But I found an interesting loophole in it that I drill on into the book, which I'm sure will raise some eyebrows from some groups of people. And I don't care.

Which is that. So there's a, after 9/11, Dick Cheney himself was like personally terrified of bio weapons. And he was part and parcel to this extreme elevation. Escalation, I mean, of, of, you know, gain a function of medical countermeasures of opening up more bio security level four labs of all of this sort of biotech.

“Billions of dollars went into this industry, this brand new industry, remember there was 9/11.”

People forget then there were the anthrax attacks.

Anthrax was mailed through the mail to some news outlets and a couple senators on Capitol Hill never been solved.

Thank you FBI. Okay. So, um, it created an entire industry about bio defense. And one of the, one of the results of that was there is, many people don't know about this. There is a, something called the national syndromic syndrome surveillance system.

That monitors that collects information in real time from set more than 7,000 emergency rooms, urgent care facilities, yours included. All of these facilities across America, 7,000 of them in the 50 states, that is a lot. All the information goes in near real time to the CDC, where it is kept and monitored. Okay. So, it's a very real system that is monitoring people. The goal of which was to create, stop a pandemic if it happens.

Well, how did that work out and go with it? Not well. But a little loophole I found in it, which is, you know, when you know this from your work in the military that a whole is exactly what an adversary targets. And a fascinating whole to me is that, and this I learned from working with the world's, or America's most senior epidemiologists, people who are trying to prevent, like outbreaks from taking over. And one of the holes in the system that they pointed out to me was the homeless population. There are 800,000 homeless people in America.

None of their information goes into that important CDC national syndrome, except confirmed with me by HHS, by the way.

“So, if you have that kind of a gaping hole, where are you going to target?”

Where are the super spreader events? Where is there no health care? Where are these people living on top of one another? Where are there symptoms of disease going to be mistaken for a zillion other things if they even have any access to a medical doctor? And so that is where I have the outbreak in America, because I was told by epidemiologists, that is a very serious warning. But the last two books you have for it, and I cannot believe you are still living in Los Angeles. You got to get out to the woods, Andy.

We get a little walk around here, but you know, the idea of insurrection and anarchy at the end of all of this, which is what happens, which is what the Defense Department is.

“What the Defense Department is preparing for.”

Sure, the big cities are just like, "Get me out of here really fast." But there are components of all of this.

You know, I did in every book, there's always a couple interviews, a couple things that people say to you, just is haunting.

And one of them was from former Senate Majority Leader Tom Dashle. So I just mentioned the anthrax attacks after 9/11. Dashle's office received an envelope of weaponized anthrax. They all got an immediate dose of sippro, which is an antibiotic assumed to kill anthrax and it did. But Dashle, Senator Tom Dashle has spent decades since working on bio defense.

He obviously is seriously concerned about this issue.

And in my interview with him, he said to me, "We were talking about nuclear war versus bio war."

And he said to me, "Unlike nuclear war." Biological war will be perhaps more terrifying, because, and then he said, "Yes, it will be death physically." Death governmentally, death of everything we know in America. But most horrifying is it will be, this is his quote, "People doing inhuman things to other people just to survive." And that's that song.

Desperation. This happens in pretty much any event. I mean, eventually people can do it with hunger, thirst, disease. Absolutely. Financial collapse. And so out in the country in the city, you know, pick your battle, literally.

And again, the point of me working on these kind of scenarios is not to create panic. It's to create pressure. It's to create conversation. You know, if nuclear war was about, we need to have this conversation while we can still have it. Bio is about stay informed.

You know, because there is, there are actions that people have to take in the event that this kind of situation happens. Period, full stop. I mean, you could, COVID could have been this brilliant situation from which to learn errors. Notice I said, "Could have been." Instead, it's like either total denial about what happened or, you know, tribal anger about, you know, the wrongs that were done and there were many.

“And so that, I think, is worth re-examining.”

I think it's really, it would be really wise to look at the problems that happen in COVID and not make those same mistakes. Well, I mean, there's a lot of speculative narratives that say that, maybe that was an experiment. To see how the population would react. I have not heard that one, the speculative narrative on that is that it's internal, domestic or external. Hmm, I don't know if it could be both, you know, it would be none, but, but I mean, a lot of those narratives weren't around.

I mean, they wanted to see how the people reacted and if they, if they, basically, if they listen to the government or if they do not listen to the government.

And, you know, I don't know, I mean, they definitely learned a lot, whoever, if it wasn't experiment. Even if it wasn't an experiment, they learned a lot about how we're going to react.

“We're going to take the vaccines, are we going to do the, I mean, they learned, are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to stay in our homes? How long are we going to buy this bullshit?”

You know, they collected a lot of information there. A lot of information, and I'm going to really tap into your fear about the National Syndromeic Surveillance System here. Again, it's fact that think about, and I'm amazed that people don't ask this question, where did all the DNA data go from those COVID tests because it was collected.

An organization that most people have never heard of, that has a budget and annual budget twice that of the Defense Department.

Really? Twice that.

“Twice, 1.7 or $8 trillion is HHS. Defense Department is about 900 million. And yet, nobody, people don't even know it. The CDC answers to HHS. The NIH, the National Institute of Health, answers to HHS. The FDA answers to HHS.”

Another situation I'm always fond of is like bringing to the discussion, "Oh, there are some really interesting organizations that you might want to know about." And again, speculative narrative versus science fiction, science fact. HHS is the organization in charge in the event of a biological incident or attack, crazy that a biological incident is a laubley.

HHS is in charge, which is stunning to think about, because what I learned also writing this whole narrative is like, "I actually wish DOD was in charge."

Really? Why is that? Why am I writing the book at the midpoint where I'm like, "You know, again, I take you through what happens, I take you through," you know, the Defense Department trying to figure out what's going on, what's happened. I have, I start the Insighting Incident in the book is in Explosion at a BSL for lab in Russia in Siberia. It's called "vector."

“It's where a lot of the work took place during the Cold War. It's a real lab. There was actually a real explosion there in 2019. An explosion at a BSL for lab is profoundly dangerous.”

And a place like Russia where they're going to immediately not be transparent. It's even more dangerous. Or maybe you could say that about every nation. But in the cover-up begins, and I've got a show you, I show readers how the Defense Department will be immediately eyes on trying to figure out what's going on. They will work with the State Department to try and get information. Information is king denial is dangerous. In the Wuhan lab leak or natural, whatever you want to call it, when Wuhan happened, the Chinese government immediately shut down access to information incredibly dangerous.

I spoke to epidemiologists who actually believe that pandemic could have been stopped. Had the Chinese government been transparent about what happened.

So that's a real plug for transparency. And the more people that know about something, the more they're going to demand transparency. Do you think they wanted to shut that down? The big, I mean, the China... You think they wanted to contain it? Did they want to contain it? That I don't know, but what I do know is because biological weapons are illegal.

If any nation has bio-weapons in their lab, they are certainly not going to be transparent about what happened. Well, we already know, and we already discussed the loopholes. We already discussed the loopholes, so they do it. I mean, it's an easy excuse.

“I think China learned a lot about that. I mean, they also have them monopoly, probably along with India for all the PPE equipment.”

And antibiotics, especially, you know, the ones that work, I've remapped it out. They could have shut that down immediately because of anything that, you know, baton is up on. We don't produce it. We don't care about actual people. We just care about money here. And so they produce all that stuff. And I think Americans learned a little bit about that during COVID. We learned about the supply chain.

Most people were shocked to find out exactly what you just mentioned. And yet very little has been done about that. Although there are some, you know, manufacturing... Even even when COVID happened, you know, there was a bit masked narrative. Well, the masks are going to stop this shit. Who makes all the masks? You get a virus that comes from China.

And we're just putting this shit on hook line and sinker body, like, oh, yeah, cool.

They, they're the ones that release the thing that leaked, that leaked the virus. And now they're going to give us masks. I mean, you can't even make our own fucking masks. We cannot make our own masks. And you can't even have a grown-up in the room, to explain to people how a mask works. So instead you had sort of people going, you know,

when I was reporting the book at the very tail end of COVID, I went to a BSL-3 lab to, you know, see what it was like. And these are former U.S. Sam Reddoctors. U.S. Sam Red is the U.S. Army Medical Research of Infection. You know, it's where the BSL-4 lab is at Fort Detrick in Maryland.

And with regards to the masks, they were telling me that if you are working in pathogens, it's just basic common knowledge that an N95 mask.

“You have to wear it properly outfitted to your face.”

You get an actual lesson in how to wear it. And it's suggested that you, that it is only going to work for 15 minutes. And that's an N95 mask. Those were gone in about two days. So the other kind of masks are essentially almost useless.

And I think that kind of... We were wearing two of them. People wearing dirty masks, you know? And sometimes you still see people walking around Los Angeles. It's a great look at face diaper you get on there.

But that nobody spoke of this. And I say nobody, I mean, like sort of a public official in a position of authority. And meanwhile, I'm learning that all the scientists in America are like shaking their head and going,

“but afraid to speak out because they're going to be called, you know?”

Be ostracized. So this was just, again, a dangerous situation from which extraordinary lessons could have been learned and were not. Let's take a break. We'll come back, we'll get into the panic. We talk a lot on this show about performance.

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So what does the panic look like?

“Did you talk to people on what that kind of desperation that panic?”

What would it do to society how fast what it happened? It happened so fast so I like to try and look at specifics again. So to keep the narrative on actual documentation. So we spoke a little bit earlier how an outbreak of this pathogen. I talked about it starts with a lab leak in Siberia.

It winds up in Los Angeles in a homeless camp. And so I looked and because I live in Los Angeles. And I am very familiar with the public health system. I've lived there for 30 years. The public health system law enforcement.

I can see a lot of the problems that have to my eye that have happened over the decades.

It wasn't always like this.

It certainly is just an absolute mess right now with very little trust. And real serious problems. So I looked at, for example, what would happen in a biological attack in Los Angeles. Because unbeknownst to many people, big cities practice these things. And they happen at the federal level.

I learned and they also happen at the state level. And so Los Angeles, state and county. California state and Los Angeles County officials get like a bizmally failing remarks in these efforts. And this just goes completely unnoticed. Like for example, we put in a whole new 911 system recently, like in the past few years.

And it completely failed upon its original test. Like a system overrun. You know, there are stories of people calling all the time people are posting on X. Like 911 from Los Angeles. And then you can see how many minutes they've been on hold.

Like 13 minutes on hold. Just to have your call answered. So this is a real serious problem day to day. Imagine if there was a biological incident where timing is everything.

“timing is everything you have to get the information out to the people.”

And instead, I learned really interesting details like. Okay, so Los Angeles has a 100,000 bottle of CIPRO. CIPRO Floxosin, which is antibiotic stash. 100,000. 100,000 bottles.

How many people does that treat? For the city officials. And I break it down of who it goes to. And so you've got like 16,000 bottles going to first responders. Obviously they need it.

And then like a bunch of them going to like. The zoo officials, you know, and the cultural affairs officials. I mean, I'm not kidding. I gave you the numbers. So it seems to be really poorly thought out.

And really what I wanted to know is what happens to law enforcement. What happens to first responders? I did an interview with a fire commissioner. And I'm Jimmy Harra, who unfortunately like died tragically last month in a car accident. I know.

And he was an incredible person.

Completely dedicated. I mean, he served as a doctor and Vietnam. And he's been dedicated to LA public health and fire safety ever since. And he told me just flat out. Los Angeles is completely unprepared for a pneumonic plague attack, period full stop.

And then he took me through some of the details of what would happen. So I like in mixing these documents with interviews like fire commissioner Harra. I could begin to see that it's just complete ignorance. It's like being an ostrich with your head in the sand. And the hundred bottles of cipro I also learned.

I have this like wacky program attached to it. And I was going somewhere in this, which is where you're asking. Where is the whole for insurrection and anarchy that the defense department and their documents is so worried about. Like how does that happen?

“That's what I wanted to really drill down on so that I could explain it to readers.”

And the hundred thousand bottles of just perfect example that would repeat around the country. So this this hundred bottle supply gets dispersed by volunteers. How does that work? How do you have imagine if you had a biological incident where you've got pneumonic plague with a hundred percent death rate? No known cure airborne.

Killing homeless people. You know, which is being mistaken for something else. A mass overdose, for example, because that's happening all over the country. That's what epidemiologists are worried about.

And then you've got this kind of wild chaos at City Hall.

“Rather in the emergency department of the city planners.”

And they like get the cipro out to everybody. And they make an announcement on Facebook, which then goes viral. And so now you have everybody in Los Angeles trying to access. But they believe is the medical countermeasure, which will save their lives and the lives of their family members. And America is a nation of guns.

500 million guns in America according to a Gallup poll.

That's so you can see. That's where insurrection and anarchy happens. That's the dashal quote. People doing inhuman things just to survive. And by the way, not for Manny Jacobson's imagination.

Looking at declassified or unclassified war games that game this out show that is exactly what people begin to kill one another over perceived medical countermeasures. It's a grim story. I mean, I think it's pretty odd. I don't think people think about it, but I mean, of course, what measure are you going to take to save your husband and your kids? And I think it's going to be like that until the playing field is level.

And it looks like Yemen, Afghanistan, you know, where there is not really much social hierarchy. Everybody's on the same playing field, you know what I mean? Yeah. And so it will continue until that happens until all the resources have been ransacked.

“It's done. There's nothing left to ransack and then you have to learn to survive of what's left.”

The devolution component of that that was stunning to me was that what the defense department prepares for. So what's interesting is I mentioned before that HHS is in charge of this when it happens. But very quickly, HHS realizes in its plant, you know, war gaming that they need the military's help. This is page one because, for example, they can't get supplies out to the states. And you're talking about when you're talking about a pathogen that's killing people in like 48 hours.

Speed is everything. And so they're trying to get medical countermeasures out to states and they need the military's help. They need transportation command. And so I had this moment in working on this book where I realized that I mentioned earlier, my God, like not since World War II, will Americans be so happy to see the military show up in their town or their city

to try and regain control to try and bring back order in sort of the insurrection that will be unfolding as people begin to panic. I mean, maybe they would be happy.

“Well, I think a lot of people would be happy because not everybody's criminally minded.”

And are going to be thinking, help is on the way. Well, how is the military going to treat the infected? And that's where it gets, especially if they don't have an antidote.

So the military I learned and you probably know this has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its personnel.

So you have imagine, so the military are protected. And now you have another situation which is the mask becomes a coveted item. So now you have President declaring an insurrection act. So that Posse Comitatis can be overridden. Posse Comitatis, the act after the Civil War that prohibits the military from carrying out law enforcement measures in the United States.

That gets repealed with insurrection act. It's the only act that can do that. The president has the authority to declare it whenever he chooses. So the insurrection act gets laid down and now military can act with those orders. Same as in a warfare. So there's like a moment in time it seemed to my eye writing this where order could be restored. But then I learned that there's only so many military.

And there are 340 million Americans. So you do the math.

And then you realize that with the shoot to kill orders and the fact that the devolution plan calls for the crit.

And you don't even really think about it until you hopefully read about it in my book and go, of course, like the roadways.

Everything from the communication systems, the banking systems, the roads, the nuclear power plants. The electrical grid. The electrical grid. Water treatment.

“Waste. This is critical infrastructure and that needs to be guarded. And that's what the military begins to guard.”

And the military must also guard the hot sites, the cold sites I told you about earlier where the devolution crews are going to. And so this kind of really spooky, almost science fiction, but again, it science fact kicks in in my reporting and as I write in the book. Where you begin to see what unfolds and how it is sort of almost inevitable the outcome of devolution. Because the center can't hold because the people cannot, the people do not know what is happening to them. And have no way of understanding what lies ahead.

And if you want a small, like a small window, like a very small window, what that looks like you can go. You can go to Florida during hurricane season. And you see how fast everything is gone, how people treat each other. That's one of the reasons I moved out of there. What was that experience like with hurricane? I mean, it was.

Was there kind of like some anarchy going on? I mean, I would not say anarchy at all. But I mean, there are, there are.

And I'm like, I've always, you know what I used to do. So I'm pretty prepared.

And then I always have been. But you're looking at gas lines that are hours and hours long. You're looking at, you know, in people hoard. So you got a guy show up with a trailer and he fills up his car and he fills up his boat.

“And then he fills up all his gas cans, you know what I mean?”

And you're wondering, is there going to be any gas left for me? All the bottled water is gone, all the food is gone, all the plywood is gone. All the generators are gone within 24 hours. And then you're waiting for ex updates to see which home depot has been resupplied with plywood. So that you can go board your windows up or which, which Walmart has some extra general.

She's got a new shipment of generators.

And the last hurricane that went there that I, this was, this was like, I'm out of here.

No, this isn't for me. There was a traffic jam from Miami, Florida all the way to Atlantic, Georgia. The entire, everybody trying to get everybody trying to get out of dodge. Everybody's trying to funnel out, you know, in a couple of highways. And it's stop and go traffic.

People are, they've run out of gas, they're pulled over on the side of the road. Everybody's hoarding. I mean, the grocery stores legit. They're, they're empty in 24 hours.

“Were people behaving like were they following traffic laws?”

Were people trying to say it's bottled at? They're, there are no traffic laws. I mean, you can't get anywhere. It's gridlocked. Wow. A gas line.

I mean, we'll go all the way down the interstate. So let me ask you. That's a hurricane. Yes. That's, that's a hurricane.

That hurricane didn't even mess. It was like a joke. So it was hurricane Matthew. I mean, then you have all these beams everywhere, the mass panic. Hurricane doesn't even hit.

And I think it was Matthew. I could be mistaken. And then you see all these memes like the days after a show like a long chair flipped upside down. We will rebuild. The threat of hurricane was even as compulsive as hurricane itself.

Yeah, just the threat. I mean, I, I, I, Well, were we calling it speculative narratives? You know, I, I mean, I've been at the speculative narrative. I mean, maybe these corporations are, are paying the new cycle to over-hyped this because

the amount of revenue that happens instantaneously for everything. Booze, cigarettes, gas, generators, everything. Apply wood, water, bullets, guns. People get worried that that, you know, they're, they're just going to last forever.

They go buy, they go buy their first AR 15. Did, was there any site of FEMA?

“The federal emergency management agency?”

No. No. Because FEMA, what do you think about FEMA? I don't really know much about it. I don't think they come in until afterwards.

But I've never had any experience with FEMA.

But FEMA is another one of those really interesting organizations that's almost not known about. And by the way, they're the ones in charge of the devolution program. So consider that. I mean, those are FEMA's all. It's not volunteers, but I know a lot of a lot of people after the hurricanes or after a natural disaster.

They'll do a mass higher in that pay. Yes. Supposedly pretty well. Yes. So you got a bunch of people that are, you don't got hired yesterday.

They're running shit.

Which, and again, like, the military is so interesting to me always has been how they function,

how it's a system of systems, flaws, weaknesses, strengths. The military has professional individuals who have a lot of experience doing what they're doing. And to your point, when you have an organization that's, like, has, like, attention on it very sporadically, you really have an organization of bureaucrats, you know, sort of pencil pushers, like, very sort of straight-minded individuals who are not gifted shall we say with flexibility as a leading care. They're really about organization.

And then suddenly there's a crisis.

“That's a really a mismatch of professionalism, which I think FEMA really drastically suffers from.”

And yet it's in the event of these sort of mass catastrophe. They're called complex catastrophes. The FEMA director calls it a maximum of maximums event. That's really what they're planning for behind the scenes.

And yet, so few of their people are actually equipped like military personnel.

And again, this is just my opinion, having studied all of this. Seems like that needs a big reconfiguring. The question is, of course, as we move into the future with science moving so fast, are these threats? Weapons of mass destruction that sort of hinge upon science, whether it's nuclear, bio drones. Are they making us move faster into toward a catastrophe, maybe?

It could also be working faster toward solution. And if so, what is the government doing to kind of stay on top of that? And what I think is happening is not much. The government's consumed with all kinds of inside baseball problems, political tribalism. And the public's consumed with what should be called speculative narratives.

And instead, being called conspiracy theories. So it's just creating this extraordinary fracture of further fracturing from solution toward more chaos.

“Which is, again, I write these books because I really believe that being informed.”

It gives you a little bit of height on being able to assess the situation about what's best for you and your family. And it also, it takes away in a big component, I think, at least for me, of doom and gloom inevitable. Because I don't want to just think America's doomed and we're just going downhill. I'm too much of a happy American to take that back. Good.

Am I alone? I have hope. There's a lot of this. But I'm also prepared because I've seen too many things go sour in my previous life. I did get you a present.

I can't remember. I can't remember. You can't remember what? Did I get a present? I got you a present.

You did get me a present. Oh, okay. Should I give it to you now? Sure. I thought you said, did I give you a present?

No, no, no. Yeah. You got me Joe Ken's long rifle, part two. I would love to give you Joe Ken's long rifle. I have two young men who are like,

Mom, I hope you get the long rifle from sick. Unfortunately, the state you live in. Wow. This is not far away.

Here we go. You are kidding me. You are kidding me. I am now prepared for bio. There we go.

Biological war is an area. Well, I don't know about that.

“We might need to get some gas masks and some other things.”

Maybe some water filtration. But you're prepared for mass panic to defend your home now.

This is pretty incredible.

I'm really amazed. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Sick. So I got a friend over there.

His name is Jason. He's VP of marketing. And he heard you're coming on. He loved the nuclear war scenario interview. So you want to give that to you.

It's got the sick flashlight on there. So you're not ever in the dark. And the new sick Romeo optic red dot. So you can fix a lot of you can you can skip right through a lot of fundamentals of shooting and just point pull the trigger with that thing. But that red dot on there.

Well, I'm going to be sure to get a lot of lessons. And I do also know, and this is going to be like a subject of envy, the good kind of envy from the number of people I know. So thank you so much. You're welcome. That's right.

That is pretty incredible.

We'll do a little lesson after this, hopefully. That would be that being a honor. Um. Literally. My kids were that was like a joke about the joke and it long gone.

And that's not far away. So I'm I'm flustered. I'm amazed. Thank you. Really.

You're welcome. A lot of lustre me. So. Right. Is that your first firearm?

I do have two firearms. Oh, nice. Right. But not that one. Right.

Um. Yeah. Well, I hope you enjoy it. When. Thank you so much.

You know, I mean, California is an interesting state in terms of all of that. But speaking of the pandemic happened like every ammo shop ran out of ammo. I remember seeing the lines and of people in California that were the were arming themselves. I remember being disgusted with the second amendment community because they were making fun of it. And they were like, these people shouldn't even have firearms or.

They're basically Democrats getting firearms.

“And I was just, I'm thinking like, yeah, what the hell is wrong with you, man?”

Yeah. Like, I mean, here were you are complaining about second amendment rights and gun rights. Non stop all day and all night. And now you have the other side of the aisle that is trying to arm themselves and everybody's on the on the same page. And and you're going to bastardize them for a.

That's incredible. I mean, that's a great point, right? That's like that gets into the sort of when people start having self-righteous indignation about when they shouldn't. They should be like. Congratulations, you know.

Um, I had an interesting story with a firearm. Okay, I'm going to, I have to think if I can tell this. Okay. Um, okay. So I get jury duty in Los Angeles being a good citizen.

I go to do my jury duty. This was several years ago. This was before COVID. So of everyone was like, Oh, shit. And he gave him something to read you with me.

No, no.

“I'm like, you know, I'm like in a room full of people or all like, why am I here?”

Okay. But, um, so before COVID, I didn't own any firearms or thought, but I did own a firearm because my grandfather was a captain in the army who was behind enemy lines in what was then called Czechoslovakia. Who became like the guy in charge when the war ended and took a looger off a Nazi and brought it home. Wow. Okay.

So this was in the possession of my mother. And when then it was given to me to give to my son, one of my two sons.

And it's a really incredible artifact because it actually, like, they're all identifiable to certain Nazis.

And in, at the end, there's, it comes with a certificate from the war department. So it's war booty, but you were allowed to actually have it. So it's officially my grandfather's and now, okay, so it's in our house. Wow. Yeah, it's incredible, right?

Just as a piece of, you know, I have his purple heart and his looger. Man, that is right. What a great heirloom. So there I am doing jury duty and it's a police brutality trial. And one of the questions that they're asking is they're trying to select jurors is who has a firearm, right?

So I'm down here. I'm like, okay, being a good citizen.

I am, and by the way, this is before jury selection. So there's 50 people in this room in this courthouse.

“All of whom under oath are the variation of that, okay?”

I'm the only one who raises my hand of having a firearm. Wow. And I was like, looking, like, what? How is this even possible? And when I was home that night at dinner, I had this discussion with my kids and my husband.

And they're like, mom, everyone in LA has illegal guns. And they don't want to admit it. Now, I have no idea if that's true, but it's a very interesting observation. And what is true is that no one else raised their hand? Man.

Maybe it's a little-- Maybe it's a little sort of perception versus reality, right? No one wanted to admit they had a firearm. I have no idea. I could see it, either way.

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I mean, what are the different scenarios? Do they have scenarios where it's a certain parts of the country? Do they have scenarios where they use the country? Do they use the country to spread it globally? Where are the targets?

“What, you know, I mean, obviously, if you want to spread,”

I mean, if it was me and I wanted to spread one globally, then I would definitely, obviously, had the airports, right? You would release it in the airports, because people are constantly coming and going, and it would be impossible for building a trace at that point. And it would spread like, I mean, with all, if you wanted to hit it more locally,

try to keep it contained, I guess, what would you had? You would head probably, unfortunately, schools, grocery stores. Well, a lot of early, war gaming planning was predicated on precisely those kinds of scenarios. Like, what would happen?

How would the targets disperse in the past 20 years? Or so, with the advent, or the rather the advancement of genetic engineering?

And we saw this in COVID. It once an airborne pathogen, right?

“So there used to only be a very few truly airborne pathogens”

that a medical countermeasure didn't exist for. And so it would, you would have to kind of do exactly what you're talking about. But have multiple targets, this was the terrorist threat. But now that an airborne pathogen can be modified with ease. We saw in COVID that it just begins to spread naturally on its own.

And if you shorten the window of, you know, contagion to death, you have one kind of effect. If you lengthen it, right? So COVID had a lot of sort of what were silent carriers for a long time. Now it's spreading in a different manner.

And so, as a result, most of the war games have begun to focus on two things,

which is like, first and foremost, and this is probably upsetting to a lot of people,

is how to keep infected people out of the United States of America. There was one war game that I write about in particular. So I take the reader through this scenario and then I kind of stop for, like, little history lessons about different war games. And one of them that was conducted in 2018 describes boats of migrants.

There's an outbreak in South America. So you've got all these panicked people leaving Venezuela in boats,

“headed to Puerto Rico hundreds of miles away, okay?”

This is actually a war game that you can read it online. And they have the CDC officials deciding what to do. Like, do we actually let them come on land? And the answer is no. And then the subtext is rules of engagement, right?

Now that is, and then, of course, you have another debate within this war game about how to deal with the press. Like, if we start shooting at migrants and boats, we're going to have a real problem that's going to be all over, you know, the news. And that kind of candor in planning for a biological incident was shocking to me.

Because it really gets at the heart of the matter of the kind of, sort of, ruthless sort of, you know, fortressing that homeland security will immediately try to do if the pathogen is outside trying to come in.

But what you learn from the war gaming is that the pathogen is almost always certainly already here.

“I mean, remember when President Trump's first administration,”

COVID happens, he closes the border with Europe. He's, you know, restricted any flights from China. But the pathogen is already here. People have it in New York City. People have it in Seattle.

I didn't interview with the former defense official in Italy, the defense minister. And he was telling, because there was a huge outbreak in Italy. I remember remember that. And you know why it was because in Milan, which is a fashion capital of the world, had Chinese, you know, individuals working in manufacturing Milan to China.

They had brought it to China. But another interesting fact I learned from the FEMA chief is that all, most of the initial cases of COVID in New York City were from Italy, not from Wuhan, and they can tell us through genetic testing later to determine the variants.

They did start in New York, it started in Washington.

In the United States, the first cases were in Washington.

But the real panic, the real sort of like, oh, my God, it's here moments, was once New York City was infected. Okay. Because then people realize there's no way to stop this. Because of movement, you know, I looked at Bubonic plague,

the black death, the plague of the black death. Because Bubonic plague becomes Newmonic plague in the lungs. And I wanted to show readers historically what happened, what has happened, and what is possible. And what was interesting is, you know, I learned this very unique fact that, of course,

pathogens travel at the rate at which humans move. So in the time of the black death, in the 1413-hundredths, in the 14th century, people moved by Caravan. People moved by a ship. So it was like slow, right?

Now people moved by airplane. You know, you can get from one side of the earth to the other in 15 hours. That's how fast things happen. And they're still going to attempt to isolate it. And I show that in the beginning of the book, because this is where you have the epidemiologists.

This is where you have public health officials. This is where you have, by the way, I mean, by no means do I mean to make everybody in government sound,

The individuals that I interview and I list them all in the front of the book, like COVID. I mean, like the nuclear war book. So that people can see, wow, you know, she's talking to the top subject matter experts in public health, in defense, in federal emergency management, extraordinarily competent people, desperately trying, literally to, you know, bring these different factions of the government together to pay attention to this threat,

to actually take actions, so that America is prepared for such a thing. And I show their stories that they tell me of, like, how the good part of that, of like how they have made progress, and then also where they are so failing.

And the failures are always political.

What measures would they go through to isolate an incident? So one of them, it's super important question. Quarantine does exist, but before that, it's all about diagnostics. We're talking about that a little bit earlier, like you went and had a COVID test, right? Now that has spiraled into it.

It's, it's whole set of rabbit hole problems. But the diagnostics, the testings are important because very few people realize that the doctor doesn't know what he's looking at. The doctor doesn't know. You can walk in with a sneeze and a cough. And the doctor doesn't know.

“That's why the doctor will say, I think you have.”

Okay, want me to give you an example that's kind of easy to wrap your head around.

Okay, strap throat. Have you had strap throat recently? No. Okay. So strap throat.

You know, you go in like, doctor might, my throat hurts. They take, they give you a strap test. strap is a bacteria, bacteria are killed by antibiotics. You go into the doctor, you say, I have a strap that give you a strap test. Because strap is ubiquitous, the test often happens in the back of the doctor's office.

Takes five minutes for a strap test.

When I was growing up in the 70s, a strap test took two or three days.

That's science. When you were growing up, it probably took ten minutes. Okay, now it's down to a couple minutes. The minute the doctor knows you have strap throat, bacteria, you are prescribed antibiotics. You usually drive to the local pharmacy on the way home from the doctor's office. Certainly, if your kids have strap, you want to get that antibiotic in them right away.

Okay, now they're fighting the pathogen. They're not going to get more sick. They're on the path to wellness. You go in there for strap, and the doctor gives you the strap test and it comes back negative. Because you have a virus, not strap.

Antibiotics do nothing for a virus.

“That's why the doctor sometimes says go home and drink tea.”

You know, takes a madville, call me tomorrow. So that's diagnostics. If you know what someone has, now you can begin to treat it. So so much of bio-war is predicated on testing. It's predicated on testing. People need, which is that dual edged sword,

because no one wants to give all their information to the government. So again, that would be another situation where people realize no if there is an outbreak of something. Testing actually helps you in your family. What is the, what lengths is the government willing to go to contain? You know, I mean, we saw just in COVID.

I mean, entering a department store, entering into the thermometer gun, where they're. Yeah. Taking your head temperature, you know what I mean, everywhere you go. And that was, I mean, at the time, you know, every minute. If you were in a car wreck, and you happen to have COVID, you died of COVID.

So they overinflated the numbers and it made it sound worse.

“And I think it took a couple months for everybody to catch on.”

And I think it, the majority of people caught on relatively quickly. And, you know, least around here that shit didn't last very long. Yeah, look at New York, and you got people eating in bubbles. Like inflatable bubbles and restaurants and everything shut down. And California, we've all heard the stories there.

Our governor closed our parks. Yeah. We couldn't go to the beach. It arrested for surfing. Which is the place to go, by the way, like fresh air, but keep going.

Yeah. But, you know, so in so anyways, what I'm getting at is that was, I mean, that was overreaction

What is the government willing to do for something like Ebola?

“Are they going to surround a city with, with the military?”

Are they, are they going to have rules of engagement? Are they going to have an escalation of force? Are they going to kill people? What are they going to do? Yes, to every one of those questions.

Right. So, and by the way, COVID was, you know, essentially a, I mean, a lot of people died. And to them, it was a lot, obviously, to their family members. But in the scope of things, a pathogen with a 1% case fatality rate is nothing. Mm-hmm.

And so, if you have a select, a tier 1 select agent, where you have a case fatality rate of 30%.

40%, 50% or 100%. The extreme measures that the government will go to. There's no such thing as two extreme. Their quarantine is, the president can, there are legally quarantinedable diseases. And the president will absolutely declare a quarantine.

“So, then the issue becomes, well, how do you enforce a quarantine, which is why the military comes in?”

And the military has not can only come in if they have, they have two lanes. The military can function under what is called defense support of civil authorities. And it's just like it sounds. The defense department is supporting the states, the law enforcement. That's when you see the national guard come in.

They do not have rules of engagement like the normal military. Because they're in support of the governor. When the insurrection act is declared, and it will be in a catastrophic biological event. The military has rules of engagement, essentially America is a wartherer. And America is what?

A wartherer. Mm-hmm. And I did this really in- There's not going to work. You just said there's 500 million guns in the country. Good luck. And so, this is the kind of bloodbath.

This is that quote from Tom Dashall, people doing inhuman things just to survive. And there are contingency plans in place. And what I learned is, of course, the tip of the iceberg. But it is enough that I describe in the scenario,

“that I think really get people thinking, just like nuclear war, this is a catastrophic situation”

that we don't even want to get even close to. And so, what are the solutions? What are the solutions?

And I believe those are always there.

When you read the worst case possible scenario, you begin to be able to think in terms of solution, because you're aware of what can happen. I mean, nobody's going to listen, even if you do surround. Even if you were to surround Nashville with military.

And the ROEs were to shoot anybody that's leaving. And you have something like Ebola break out. How would you rather die? Bleeding out from every orifice in your body or being shot and slides out immediately. I know which way I want to go.

I mean, this is, you know, these kind of maximum of maximum events is something that used to be very far afield in planning, I believe. You know, it was kind of in the Cold War. There was a real effort to push for what was called civil defense. You know, it was this idea that you could save the population.

From itself, essentially, that everybody would sort of go along to get along. And that those days are completely over. And what is left is essentially what's called continuity of government. Cog. That's the acronym.

And it's exactly like it sounds. The government must continue. You know, there's another interesting detail I learned. So you know about Defcon, defense readiness condition. And you know, five is where we normally are.

And then at 9/11, it went to three. At nuclear war, it's going to go to one. That means nuclear war. Two is like nuclear war. We don't know because it's classified weather.

We've ever gone to Defcon 2, but Defcon 3 was 9/11. There is a similar defense or similar civilian readiness condition.

The agency, many people have never heard of or aren't sure what it does.

The agency in charge of devolution. And it's called Cog Cog. Again, completely classified program.

“The term itself has been declassified, which is why.”

Former FEMA Director Craig Fugate could discuss it with me. And they're four levels. And when Cog Cog Cog 1 gets declared. That's the triggering point for devolution. So the situation you're talking about is going to go in.

Concert with Defcon, you know, as the situation ratchets up. And then once you hit Cog Cog 1. Devolution protocols, and then everybody leaves Washington, D.C., it's called the National Capital Regional. I love that they're all this weird, nomenclature that keeps the rest of us out. And I think, you know, why is that?

But it's not called Washington, D.C., it's called the National Capital Region. And everybody departs and goes to their bunkers. And the military moves into the states. Not a great scenario. Let's switch gears here real quick.

We've got a hot question for you. 100%. July 25, 1946, Bikini, a toll. There are only seven atomic bombs on the entire planet. And the US is about to spend one blowing up its own ships underwater to see what happens.

That bomb was called Baker. And it became the first time humanity really understood what fallout was. The ships that survived the blast were so radioactive they had to abandon the cleanup, because it was killing the sailors doing it. Bikini is still uninhabitable today, 80 years later.

Can you walk us through Baker? Because this is the moment we learned a nuke doesn't just destroy. It poisons everything for generations. Yeah, it's a fascinating moment in time that's being discussed there. And journalists detail just because I have spent my life interviewing people who have actually been there.

Really? It's what gives me a little bit of an authority. And I mean that as an author, you know, I wasn't there. Like you were in the war theater. I never have been.

I interviewed. So the man who wired that bomb, who wired the Baker bomb. He armed wired and fired it. His name is Alfred O'Donnell. He's now dead. But I interviewed him from my book Area 51,

which was sort of my first foray into nuclear weapons. And O'Donnell was with a small team of engineers called EGNG. And so even more interesting is that O'Donnell walked me through. How do you, like I said to him, how do you, how do you arm, wire, wire, arm and fire a nuclear weapon?

To which he said, well, that's really classified,

“but I can give you the layman's version of it, okay?”

Because that, by the way, is what prohibits most rogue groups from being able to acquire a nuclear weapon. They don't have the army and firing device. That's what's so jealously guarded. It's incredibly complex.

Allodonnell never left the country.

He never left the country because he would be kidnapped. And he had a minder until he died. Like an FBI minder keeping eyes on him. Kind of always watching us whenever I was interviewing him. Having lunch with him at the Chinese restaurant, he had a lot of secrets.

He wired 186 nuclear weapons for the government in the Marshall Islands and in Nevada. And what I learned about that baker bomb is that in those days, we've been talking about how science and technology have advanced, there was no remote wiring system.

“The way there is now, I mean, it did exist, but it wasn't ubiquitous, right?”

So now you do this and you blow something up at a distance. Or you do this and you book. So they had cables. Have you ever seen that photograph of that? It's like ships in the at all.

And you see this mushroom cloud and coming up out of the water.

Oh, it's an incredible photo.

We'll photograph on some incredible photo. And O'Donnell took me through how they had to lay cables from the arming facility to the actual bomb. Wow, how far were they? They were not far away. This is like in those days where, you know, they would set the situation up.

So they would go out on a ship, ship further out from the at all, maybe 25 miles away.

“But, and they would do some remote firing, but the actual device had to be attached to its armed system.”

Onshore, which is just kind of an unfathomable detail in today's world. How was he psychologically? How many sailors died?

Well, that was the first atomic test after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I mean, you know, that was a really pivotal moment in history because there was a kind of decision of like maybe we're going to sort of not go nuclear. And, you know, there was lots of debate in the international community, whether it should be monitored. And the Navy stepped in and was like, you know, we're in business here. And then the nuclear arms race took off with that baker bomb. And there were more than a hundred atmospheric nuclear tests that happened after that.

And the size of that test, by the way, was tiny compared to what would have come later because that was an atomic weapon. There was only atomic weaponry in those days. It wouldn't be until the very early 1950s that the thermo nuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb, would be invented. And the hydrogen bombs are what are megatons. The atomic weapons were still in the kiloton range.

So while that bomb looks huge, you'll see in the photo, it's not, you know, Castle Bravo or Ivy Mike. The megaton weapons that we're going off later. So psychologically, how was O'Donnell? I mean, you know, it took a toll on those individuals, but they also were so conditioned. Some might say programmed to believe.

“And no, I'm going to say conditioned because Russia was such a threat, you know?”

I mean, totalitarian communism was just a looming threat. And everyone that worked within the military industrial complex in those days knew it was conditioned to be extremely fearful of it and was determined to beat it. And, you know, people have their opinions now, but having interviewed a lot of cold war warriors. I completely reserve judgment on that and just go with what they, what they talk about about how serious that threat was.

Last question. Yeah. Is America prepared for a biological war? I mean, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

And biological work can never happen, you know?

It can never happen. This is what I would talk about with nuclear war, where I would say, you know, nuclear war is insane. And every person I ever interviewed told me that. These are people in nuclear command and control that retired. You can never have a nuclear war.

Civil law is a, it's a, it's the end game. And biological war is the same situation. It is an end game. We cannot have one. COVID needs to be re-examined as a, as a lesson.

What can we learn from this?

“And what can we never do again with those mistakes?”

Same mistakes. And how do we educate people so that they, so that they can have conversations? Like we're having a, you know, airing a little bit on the like, oh my god, this is a disaster.

So that you realize how do I participate in the dialogue so that it can never happen?

You know, it can never happen. And that can be a specific different lane for all kinds of us. Each one of us, like some people will really take issue with gain of function. We'll say that must be shot down. The current president has shot down gain of function research, you know?

Others, well, I mean, I didn't even mention how many biosafety labs there are right now. Like I did, we did speak about how during, you know, before 9/11 there were two in America. There was one in Atlanta at CDC and one at Fort Dietrich. Two. Now there are 17 in America.

There's 17. 17. There are 110 around the world. In countries where there are wars going on. You could.

The BSL3 labs, which are just one degree below, which, by the way, you can work with anthrax, plague, haunted virus in BSL3. There are 3500 of them around the world.

They're just working, working away without kind, and no organization tracks this,

no government organization. Academics and scientists track this.

“So you pick your lane once you know about this stuff.”

What do I want to pay attention to and kind of keep eyes on that would be a good. Well, keeping track of what labs are doing what is a great starting place. Wow. Well, my conclusion would be. The governments prepared themselves for it, but they haven't done shit to prepare the rest of us.

And they probably never will.

“Or it's a considered such a ratified problem.”

You know, it's the old. It's a bit like the nuclear issue, like that's never going to happen. But I do think that the COVID pandemic really has the potential in a good way to flip the switch

on that ostrich in the sand thinking before that people could say,

"Oh, come on, there hasn't been a pandemic since the Spanish flu."

“You know, the influenza pandemic of 1918.”

That's, that's of the past. And COVID really was a wake-up call that, "Oh, shit. You can just be caught completely off guard. You don't want to be caught unaware." Yeah.

Well, Annie, those are fascinating discussions. Always a pleasure. Likewise. Thank you. No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan show from,

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